Henry Pryor, who invented the Merlyn bowling machine that helped England reclaim the Ashes in 2005 after an 18-year wait, has died aged 92.

Pryor came to cricket late and through the side door. He took up coaching in his 50s, when his son Matt started playing as a child. He joined the Association of Cricket Coaches and began working with primary schoolchildren in inner-city areas, devoting much of his life to grassroots coaching The Guardian.

Dissatisfied with the bowling machines then available — the mechanical contraptions that fire balls at batsmen for practice — Pryor began building something better. The result was Merlyn, a machine capable of reproducing almost any delivery in cricket, from the leg spin of Australia's Shane Warne to the raw pace of Brett Lee. After moving to Llowes in the Welsh Borders, Pryor met Gordon Rye, a retired GPO electronics engineer, who fitted Merlyn with a programmable brain. That meant specific sequences of overs — Warne's, for instance — could be fed in and replayed. A transportable prototype followed, built by Dave Cross. Pryor's mother, Anna, managed the project's finances The Guardian.

In 2003, John Abrahams, then an assistant coach at the ECB National Academy, saw the prototype and asked for it to stay at the academy in Loughborough. England Academy director Rod Marsh had already visited Merlyn in its barn in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, and decided after trials to use it with the senior England team BBC Sport.

When the 2005 Ashes arrived, Pryor transported Merlyn between Test venues in a horse box. England used the machine on every practice day before each Test to work out Warne's angles — the directions and trajectories at which the ball would leave his hand and turn. By then, Pryor had spent roughly a decade refining the machine, which could bowl every kind of delivery from leg breaks to reverse swing The Guardian.

Andrew Strauss, who became the first player to score two centuries in that series, wrote in his 2007 autobiography that Merlyn had "played a pretty big part" in the summer. England scored 400-plus in three of their first innings, a tally the team attributed in part to hours spent against the machine. Warne dismissed Strauss five times across the series, which made the practice all the more valuable BBC Sport.

At the time, Merlyn was a one-off. Pryor had received inquiries from teams around the world, but the machine was heavy, cumbersome, and briefly stranded after the series ended. Former England captain Mike Gatting was an early champion, praising its ability to help batsmen read length and line — where the ball pitches and in what direction it moves BBC Sport.

After the Ashes triumph, Pryor designed a lighter version focused on spin bowling, licensed the technology to Bristol-based company Bola, and the first production machines were delivered in 2009 The Guardian.

Born in Knockholt, Kent, one of four children of Olive and Charles Pryor, a tea merchant, Pryor was educated at Eton College, did two years of national service in the navy, and read history at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in 1957. He spent six years in the family tea business, Pryor and Tindall, before working as an estate agent and in property management. From 1985 to 1992 he worked for the Innisfail Laundry, then moved to Wales in 1995 and devoted himself full-time to Merlyn and school coaching The Guardian.

Pryor's first marriage, to Deirdre, with whom he had three daughters — Georgina, Lucinda and Henrietta — ended in divorce. In 1979 he married Anna Harcourt-Cooze, the mother of his son Matt and the author of the obituary published in The Guardian. She, Matt, and five stepchildren survived him The Guardian.

Pryor was 71 during that Ashes summer, hauling a handmade machine around the country in a horse box so that England's batsmen could face something close to the real thing. That is his legacy: not a medal or a cap, but a barn-built invention that changed how cricketers prepare.